Blog
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Why choose Zabbix?
If your network is complex enough to manage, you want to choose a solid monitoring tool. I like to look at these criteria when evaluating monitoring solutions: It’s not difficult to set up. It doesn’t have to be easy, but I don’t want a setup that’s so complex it makes me dread the task. Consistently…
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Monitor a Mac’s TimeMachine backups
If your supporting Mac’s in your environment, you probably have come across TimeMachine, Apple’s answer to backups to a local disk or NAS. While configuring TimeMachine on a Mac is very easy, and good Admin wants to keep track that these backups are actually being run on a regular basis. The problem with this is…
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AWS Throttles Its Customers
I’ve been working with large files for a few years now. These zip files are normally over a gigabyte and can easily go into the 50-100 gigabyte range. They contain data that can only be compressed to about 50%, so there’s no way to make them much smaller – they are what they are. These…
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Tuning MySQL’s Innodb for Smaller Sites
Scour the ‘net for how to reduce your MySQL server footprint, and you won’t find much. Everyone seems to want to beef up its settings, and I’ve been one of them. When you have a server cluster taking thousands of requests per second, the battle cry is often for more RAM to aid in caching…
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How to monitor Unifi equipment
There’s been a lot of talk on the ‘net about monitoring Unifi equipment. Unifi is a brand of prosumer networking equipment from a company called Ubiquiti. If you’ve ever wanted “the good stuff” for your home or office network, make sure to have a look at them, but I digress. One of the drawbacks of…
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How to get the “up(1)” to show for a Item’s status value.
In Zabbix, when you poll an Item for a Host, you sometimes get back a numeric “1” (one) or “0” (zero), but you’d like to display it in English. as an Up or Down value. You’ll typically see this when you poll a Service on a Host, such as SSH or HTTPS. When defining the…
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What You’ll Find Here
I’ve been in Tech since punchcards were a thing, and throughout that time, I’ve benefited from the knowledge of others in the industry. This site will house the tips and tricks I’ve learned over the years, representing my attempt to give back. Information on this site is correct to the best of my knowledge. I…